Amazon has raised the prices of its hardware devices by as much as 60%, blaming "significant increases in memory and storage component costs." TechCrunch reports: The price explosion impacted Fire TVs, Echos, Kindles, and Eeros. One egregious example that's been cited is that of the Echo Dot, one of Amazon's cheapest smart speakers, the price of which jumped 60% overnight, from $49.99 to $79.99. Price-tracking sites like CamelCamelCamel show the stark uptick, which has previously hovered much lower. [...] The company also said that it would continue to offer occasional promotions to customers over the course of the next year. Amazon said in a statement: "The consumer electronics industry is facing significant increases in memory and storage component costs. After absorbing these increases for as long as we could, we recently adjusted pricing across our product lines."

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The SEC is investigating the near-collapse of AI-focused hedge fund Situational Awareness, sending subpoenas to major Wall Street banks for details about the fund's trades, borrowing, and communications with lenders. The fund, founded by former OpenAI researcher Leopold Aschenbrenner, managed over $30 billion and borrowed tens of billions more before leveraged bets unraveled, forcing it to sell most of its stock portfolio to Citadel at a discount. The New York Times reports: The subpoenas asked for details on the timing of Situational Awareness's trades and for its communications with lenders about the money it was borrowing, also known as "leverage," two of those people said. The subpoenas additionally warned the banks to preserve any information regarding the San Francisco hedge fund. The S.E.C. oversees financial markets with an eye toward protecting small investors, and has brought civil cases regularly against investment firms that produced large losses. Any investigation into Situational Awareness would be at its earliest stages, and it's no guarantee that it would lead to fines or other punishment. The hedge fund has not been accused of wrongdoing.

[...] Situational Awareness had a fast rise and an even quicker retreat. Founded just two years ago by Leopold Aschenbrenner, a former researcher at OpenAI, it rode the A.I. boom to soaring investment returns. To achieve those results, however, the fund relied on heavy borrowing, as well as complicated and expensive financial instruments that magnify gains -- and losses. The latter piled up quickly last month when the stock prices of publicly traded, high-flying A.I. companies dipped. At the same time, shares in more traditional technology companies -- which the hedge fund had been betting against -- rose, compounding the problem. Situational Awareness was forced into a fire sale. It wound up selling most of its stock portfolio to a rival, Citadel, at a discount.

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Steganography is the practice of hiding a secret message inside of (or even on top of) something that is not secret.

Security researcher Xusheng Li recently discovered something interesting about newer versions of Microsoft Paint and Photos, two apps built into Windows. When a user types an AI drawing prompt like "draw me a fish using crayons on a blue background", the app does more than generate the image. It also sends the prompt to Microsoft's servers, which send back a unique serial number called a GUID . That number then gets invisibly embedded into the image itself, hidden in the pixels but recoverable by those who know where to look. Movie studios used to do something similar with the "screener" copies of films they sent to Academy voters ahead of the Oscars. Each copy carried a short string of numbers hidden invisibly inside it. Viewers couldn't see it, but if a pirated copy showed up online, forensic experts could pull that hidden number out and trace it back to whoever the copy was originally sent to. Today, streaming companies use the same basic idea, but the challenge has shifted: instead of watermarking discs, they're working on how to trace a live video stream back to a specific person or location. This kind of hidden watermarking shows up in printed material too. Many color laser printers secretly stamp every page with a pattern of tiny yellow dots, nearly invisible to the naked eye, that can identify the exact printer and the date and time something was printed. Something similar can be done with plain text on a screen. Zero-width Unicode characters are invisible characters a computer can read but a person can't see. These characters can be woven into a block of text to secretly mark it. Paper money may also contain hidden messages . The Central Bank Counterfeit Deterrence Group has built at least two different patterns made of five small circles into the artwork on banknotes around the world. Scanners, copiers and photo-editing software can be coded to detect these patterns and refuse to reproduce currency. Hidden messages can also be hidden in sound. A company called SilverPush developed development kids for Android apps that listened for inaudible ultrasonic "beacons": five-letter tracking codes hidden above the range of human hearing, which let the company link devices to a specific TV or location without their knowledge. Movie theaters can use a form of copy protection called Cinavia. This technology creates an inaudible watermark embedded in a film's audio track that survives even if someone records the movie with a camcorder in the theater. If that watermark later turns up on a home device, Cinavia blocks the pirated copy from playing.

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Far-right leader echoes ally Donald Trump and says operations to ‘track down illegal immigrants’ should begin this week, amid earthquake aftermath

Colombia’s far-right president, Abelardo de la Espriella, has announced a crackdown on immigrants, ordering authorities to detain and deport people who are in the country irregularly or have committed crimes.

In office for just over two weeks, the millionaire former lawyer made the announcement on Sunday as the country continued to grapple with the aftermath of a 7.4-magnitude earthquake on 10 August that killed more than 300 people and destroyed more than 30,000 homes.

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Sonam Wangchuk’s fast was spark that drove youth protest movement – and now he wants to cleanse the political system

For 26 days, India watched as Sonam Wangchuk wasted away. His hunger strike, held in solidarity with India’s “Cockroach” youth protest movement, would prove to be one of the most politically consequential fasts held in the country’s modern history.

Many in the country view the gruelling fast, which began on 28 June, as the crucial spark that helped propel the Cockroach movement into one of the most formidable challenges to the government of prime minister, Narendra Modi, in more than a decade.

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When Anthropic disclosed earlier this month that it would be applying a statistical word-choice watermark to its Claude text output, the company noted that at least 190 AI providers have agreed to abide by Europe's AI transparency rules. One such company is Microsoft, which has been applying its own form of watermarking to images created with the assistance of AI in its Paint and Photos applications for Windows. The EU's Code of Practice on Transparency of AI-generated Content requires that signatories mark content created with the help of AI in a machine-readable format and that associated metadata indicates at least whether content has been manipulated by AI, or entirely created by it. The regulation creates an obligation but does not specify the method of compliance, so signatories can employ whatever technology best achieves the goals [PDF] of "effectiveness, interoperability, robustness, and reliability." Microsoft has gone beyond minimum requirements in an effort to address AI safety concerns. The EU rules encourage, but do not demand, the inclusion of metadata that does more than answer whether creators used AI to produce content. Redmond, as one of the founders of the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA), has chosen to embed AI-assisted images in Paint and Photos with a globally unique identifier (GUID) linked to the prompt that created the image. Xusheng Li, a software developer at Vector 35, recently published an analysis of Microsoft's approach, which the Windows biz previously disclosed in the Paint and Photos documentation but did not detail. "Microsoft Paint and Photos embed a server-issued GUID as an invisible watermark in locally generated AI images," Li explained in a LinkedIn post. "Your prompt is sent to Microsoft for moderation, and the returned GUID is encoded into the pixels." Li notes that the invisible GUID watermark – a 16-byte integer – is distinct from the visible watermark option that Microsoft provides to users of its Paint software and Microsoft 365 AI features. If Microsoft associates each prompt with the user who sent it, then the company could in theory identify users by referring to the watermark in an image. Long ago, manufacturers of laser printers implemented this sort of tracking and the practice alarmed privacy advocates when it came to light. "Microsoft receives and moderates the prompt, then issues the unique GUID that Paint embeds into the locally generated image," Li said. "Paint also sends the previous promptGenerationId as lastPromptGenerationId with its next moderation request, allowing successive requests to be linked explicitly." Li argues that while Microsoft has disclosed its AI safety measures, it hasn't sufficiently clarified that its C2PA manifest contains a GUID linked to users' AI image prompts. Microsoft did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Other companies are thinking along similar lines. Meta last month said it is working on its own watermarking technology called Content Seal. And OpenAI has been applying Google DeepMind's SynthID and C2PA metadata to its images. Those seeking to avoid having a tracking number embedded in their AI-generated images may want to explore running an open weight model like Stable Diffusion and running on-device open-source tools. ®